Diet vs. Exercise for Weight Loss

This will look familiar to those who’ve seen my 2012 presentation (either live or vicariously at Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death). Tomorrow I cover the wild finding about meat and weight gain. Note the caloric expenditure equivalencies I present here are assuming no dietary compensation, something seen quite dramatically, for example, in nut consumption. Given how hard it is to work off food, let’s make our calories count by choosing the most nutrient dense foods. Calculate Your Healthy Eating Score may be a good place to start.

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I have experienced trying to lose weight mostly by diet and mostly by exercise.  I think this post is misleading.  When I tried to lose weight by mostly dieting, I found that I had to *severely* limit how much I was eating.  Just dieting only would make me lose perhaps 30 pounds and then I would easily gain the weight back. Once I started to bicycle everyday, I found that I could lose weight without starving myself and that I would lose weight consuming up to 3000 calories a day.  I am sure that when I was mostly dieting, I was consuming less than 2000 calories.  I lost 95 pounds mostly by exercise, with some dietary moderation, and have kept off every pound. I know a man who is completely sedentary and he had to consume 1000 calories a day to lose weight.  I was exercising perhaps 90 minutes a day and was able to consume about 6 candy bars worth of calories than he could and still lose weight.  Look at this study, which showed that persons who exercised and burned 500 more calories but did not compensate or increase their caloric intake by 500 calories lost just as much weight than the dieters who cut 500 calories from their diet.   The persons who exercised without compensation also had better health outcomes, such as much greater loss of visceral fat and better results on systemic insulin resistance.  The dieters also lost muscle mass, whereas the exercisers did not.  Most of the people got it right, the the so called experts are absolutely and completely wrong- most weight loss and exercise studies do not have equal calorie deficits, for instance most studies comparing dieters and exercisers have the dieters cutting about 700 calories whereas the exercisers are burning 200 calories.  This study has equal calorie deficits.  http://www.sportsnutritionworkshop.com/Files/46.SPNT.pdf  Also, it might be that it is easier for someone to diet if they are not in shape.  However, as someone who is in shape, I would rather exercise than cut calories- of course eat healthy.  Another thing to consider is that is difficult to meet one’s nutritional needs when there is severe calorie restriction necessitated by taking a just diet approach.  It is easier to meet a person’s nutritional needs on 3000 calories than 1000- esp if one is Vegan.  A low calorie Vegan diet cannot meet a person’s protein needs- esp when you consider that 440 calories of beans and rice only yields 20 grams of protein.  A Vegan could easily meet their protein requirement on 3000 calories.  I now consume 3500 calories and don’t gain weight- I would if I stopped exercising.  Also, persons doing Neal Barnard’s diet without exercise usually have lower HDL than if they were exercising.  It is best to exercise a lot and eat a less calorie restricted Vegan diet for weight loss.

Experience has shown me I have to also exercise if I want to lose weight while dieting.   For starters, it decreases my appetite and cravings.  For another, it speeds up my resting metabolism.   It’s not as simple as saying someone has to run an extra 700 yards to work off an extra butter scoop, which may be true, but it’s missing the main point.